[ANN][DASH] Dash (dash.org) | First Self-Funding Self-Governing Crypto Currency

[toknormal]

you can always have multiple 'accounts' I guess, so I really don't get your point.

Then I suggest you take out a Cryptonote hedge (or even go all in ). You can always invest in both. That will save you the headache.

[qwizzie]

De-clustered voting

If you run multiple masternodes and use the manual wallet "vote-many" function on commandline, all votes for a proposal are submitted to the network within one second. So it's easy as pie to see which and how many masternodes belong to one owner.

To counter this issue, we just released "de-clustered" voting. Simply hit the "vote" button on a Dashwhale proposal page. Your proposal votes are submitted over several hours at random timepoints. Nobody is able to group your masternodes based on their votes anymore.

This feature strongly enhances your voting anonymity, compared to manual command-line wallet voting!

https://www.dashwhale.org

Best,
Rango

Thank you! This is a great improvement!!

i agree, great work Rango !!

[qwizzie]

This is not true. Darksend was closed source until RC5 in August/September 2014, when the source code was released. The rest of the Darkcoin source was open, but the Darksend portion was closed until Aug/Sept 2014. I helped write the official press release about Darksend being open-sourced, so I remember it well =)

and I think that worked out well, don't you?  I mean, we did have a bunch of complainers/trolls again, saying you can't close source it, but it is after all a company, Dash is, and we should use tactics that protect our intellectual property until it's needed to be open sourced, which is required to be taken seriously in the crypto world for good reason.  Still, while working on it, we don't need to let everyone see what we're doing.  We can hide until the big reveal just like Apple does.

There are no plans to close source anything. We're just going to build it privately, then open source it as soon as we launch  .

that's good news!
But why not build it publicly, so other developers/volunteers can help?

Also, now that you are online, can you please answer my newb questions:

1) How are the masternode locks enforced in the network? How do you force miners to not mine a double spent transaction?
2) Is it possible that there is a competing locked transaction? If that transaction has a higher fee (double spend attempt), I guess the miners rather confirm the transaction with the higher fee...
3) Masternodes don't get fees to lock transactions? What is the incentive to do the work? How are the masternode rewards distributed? How can the network "know" that masternodes are online and doing the work in stead of just being idle to have a lower bandwidth usage?
4) I wonder how you can have so much transactions per second? (the slide shows 500-1500) I read that bitcoin is limited to 7 transactions per second. I showed that it seems impossible to lock 350 transactions simultaneously with 3500 masternodes, unless you allow overlap. But that should be avoided, because it can happen that a masternode has the power to decide which of the 2 transactions he confirms during a double spend attack.

1.) There is code that scans all incoming blocks for transaction locks when accepting transactions and blocks. This means that a block that contains a conflicting transaction will be automatically rejected.
2.) The answer to this one is 3 fold.
    a. Currently if there are conflicting locks on the network, they will actually cancel each other. 2 conflicting locks doesn't really give miners a choice, it just removes instantX and goes back to proof of work.
    b. The quorums are selected by inputs though, so you'll get the same quorum for the same transaction even with a different fee. This means, they would have already decided and no conflicting lock would be issued.
    c. The new improved way is to use the quorum timestamp, then take the earliest one always.
3.) Masternodes are paid from the blockchain reward, which will be worth more as the services are utilized more. My position is that monetary services of the network should be provided at no or low cost, then we can add on other services over the coming years by financing them from the budget. The masternode network will own Virtual Corporations that are working to expand the reach of Dash. Then they will be paid from the dividends from those companies (a few years off).
4.) DAPI was just one of many components -- it isn't what allows for such scalability  

oh boy, more mystery .. just what we need  

[ddink7]

Evan, I appreciate mystery just as much as the next guy, but can you give us any idea when one or more of the whitepapers will be released? Or at least when we will get more details about Evolution? You said that you were going to release the whitepapers "the right way" but didn't explain what that entailed. Thank you!

[illodin]

It seems like this cryptonote thing and dash have a different approach to privacy. need to research more now...

Yes, Cryptonote has so called on-chain anonymity, and DASH has so called off-chain anonymity. They are different approaches aiming to achieve the same thing. The difference is, that the mixing of inputs and outputs (where the money is coming and where it's going) is retained in the blockchain and protected by math in on-chain anonymity, whereas in DASH's off-chain anonymity the mixing is done outside the blockchain by the masternode network and the link between inputs and outputs is not recorded into the blockchain.

I'm not sure if the coming Evolution version will change that though? Evan has hinted that all transactions will be private by default which would imply that there will be some changes to how the anonymity is achieved.

In the end we're all going after the same thing, a replacement for fiat, that can't corrupted or controlled by any single entity.

Requirements:
- Fungibility - All units of the current must be interchangeable (after sending coins they shouldn't have history attached)
- Speed - The currency must be able to compete with credit cards (1-5 second double-spend proof confirmations)
- Governance - The currency must be governed in a decentralized and decisive way
- Funding - The currency must have a permanent decentralized funding source for development, marketing, legal, etc
- Scalability - The currency must be able to scale to billions of transactions per day with 100% decentralization
- Ease Of Use - The currency must be usable by normal every day people

DASH attempts to fulfill all those requirements above and is actively working towards them, and features currently 4 (and a half as it has a basic GUI wallet I suppose) of them. Cryptonote coins seem to aim only at 1/6th of those requirements of digital cash.

[illodin]

There are no plans to close source anything. We're just going to build it privately, then open source it as soon as we launch  .

that's good news!
But why not build it publicly, so other developers/volunteers can help? 

Probably because trying to bring more people to develop new core features which likely requires a lot of quick back and forth and rapid refactoring would just slow everything down. Bringing more people to develop features on top of the core however is more desirable.

[toknormal]

DASH attempts to fulfill all those requirements above and is actively working towards them

There is one more requirement that Dash addresses - which kind of characterises all of it's approaches from there on.

Bitcoin compatibility. Thats why Dash has been able to garner a wealth of infrastructure to support it - from desktop wallets to mobile and hardware ones, hassle-free support from exchanges, not to mention all of the new technologies that are now starting to emerge to support bitcoin.

Without that compatibility, establishing an eco-system around the coin is like swimming through syrup. (IMO. But, some other coins have had a problem with the most basic of tools    ).

[moocowmoo]

De-clustered voting

If you run multiple masternodes and use the manual wallet "vote-many" function on commandline, all votes for a proposal are submitted to the network within one second. So it's easy as pie to see which and how many masternodes belong to one owner.

To counter this issue, we just released "de-clustered" voting. Simply hit the "vote" button on a Dashwhale proposal page. Your proposal votes are submitted over several hours at random timepoints. Nobody is able to group your masternodes based on their votes anymore.

This feature strongly enhances your voting anonymity, compared to manual command-line wallet voting!

https://www.dashwhale.org

Best,
Rango

Nice to see the needed update!
Good job!

--

Users of dashman, I added this functionality in the wee-hours over the weekend.
(You can re-cast your previous votes to create new randomized timestamps)

Let me know if you have any problems with it!

dashman version 0.1.9 released

https://github.com/moocowmoo/dashman

Added new (beta) command "dashman vote"
 - automates vote submission
 - randomizes vote timestamps up to one day in the past to help disassociate ownership
 - requires:
    - dash-cli in $PATH
    - masternode.conf in $HOME/.dash
    - python 2


This is a beta release.
Worst case it crashes harmlessly, but let me know and I'll push fixes.
For now, it only submits votes. It doesn't know anything about previously submitted votes.
The network only accepts "YES" and "NO" votes, selecting "ABSTAIN" simply doesn't do anything and will not affect a previously cast vote.
This may change in the future to allow for removing a previously cast vote from the network.

[moocowmoo]

uh - will this work on Pi?

As long as you have a masternode.conf set up, I don't see why not.

[DrDeepWeb1]

Can some of you guys come aver and help answer some questions people are asking. Thanks !!

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/3oftzn/lets_have_a_chat_about_dash_bitcoin_payment/

His post has become quite popular and keep in mind there are around 80k subscribers to this sub.(these are just the regular visitors) (many people dont subscribe) There is a guy that has got involved with the discussion. (Vendor_BBMC) if we need to convince anyone its this guy! hes very involved in the DMN's and also very vocal on the DNM forums.

Thanks.

dont forget to up-vote this post so it stays at the to of this sub!

[moocowmoo]

uh - will this work on Pi?

As long as you have a masternode.conf set up, I don't see why not.

cool - oh wait
My MN.conf is setup on the WIN7 HOT-side
I don't use it on COLD side - hummmm

either side can send the vote since they both have the mnprivkey.

I built the utility to work against my main (has keys) linux wallet with all the masternode.conf entries, but there's no reason I can't make it work on the internet side (for single-masternode owners) too.

I don't even know if a internet-side daemon can even use the masternode.conf -- I'll take a look.

EDIT:

nope:

moo@7f3mdof3i78:~/.dash$ ./dashd
Dash server starting
moo@7f3mdof3i78:~/.dash$ Error: You must specify a masternodeprivkey in the configuration. Please see documentation for help.

--


I may have to update dashman to work against dash.conf entries too.

[BitWater]

uh - will this work on Pi?

As long as you have a masternode.conf set up, I don't see why not.

cool - oh wait
My MN.conf is setup on the WIN7 HOT-side
I don't use it on COLD side - hummmm

either side can send the vote since they both have the mnprivkey.

I built the utility to work against my main (has keys) linux wallet with all the masternode.conf entries, but there's no reason I can't make it work on the internet side (for single-masternode owners) too.

I don't even know if a internet-side daemon can even use the masternode.conf -- I'll take a look.

I may have to update dashman to work against dash.conf entries too.

Do we have to have the ./dashd running at the same time? I got an error as it was looking for dash-cli to be running in the background. This is on my hot side that im trying to achieve this.

[moocowmoo]

Do we have to have the ./dashd running at the same time? I got an error as it was looking for dash-cli to be running in the background. This is on my hot side that im trying to achieve this.

For now, dash-cli needs to be in your PATH environment variable.
Add to your path by doing this:

Code:

export PATH=/path/to/the/folder/containingdashcli:$PATH

then run dashman vote

Also, dashd needs to be running in order to broadcast the vote to the network.

[moocowmoo]

To clarify, you can vote from ANY sync'd wallet by simply dropping a masternode.conf into $HOME/.dash
(and restarting the wallet if wanting to use 'vote' or 'vote-many', using dashman doesn't require a wallet restart)

I've not tried it yet myself, but voting only uses the masternodeprivkeys within the masternode.conf

[Otoh]

Please to upvote my post warning about problems with Cryptsy withdrawals since the 5th Oct:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3nkotr/cryptsy_responds_to_coinfire

Otohs 1 point 26 minutes ago

I had over $50,000 on Cryptsy on the 5th Oct, I sold (at a loss) for BTC, LTC & DASH, I was able to withdraw the 8,433 DASH, but the 2,886 LTC & 76.24 BTC have been stuck there for over one week, I was then locked out of my account and dealing with support has been a nightmare, fobbed off with "you're in a queue" or ignored mostly.

I would not advise risking any funds there atm.

Will update on developments...

[AzzAz]

I have similar experience with Cryptsy. Though for 0.75 BTC but same. And support disappeared 3 days ago. 7 days waiting...

[moocowmoo]

You have MAD skills :-D

Hehe, thanks. I do what I can.  These small projects are fun! And, a nice break between daddy duties.

I don't remember asking you this but - why are you not on the DEV team?

Well, even if I were, I'd be part time, baby duties leave fewer hours to hack than I'd like.
But, maybe I already am in a sense.
I think anybody that writes code for dash is part of the 'dev team'.

[moocowmoo]

cool - oh wait
My MN.conf is setup on the WIN7 HOT-side
I don't use it on COLD side - hummmm

Added support for voting on the hot node (hot being Internet, dangerous)

(Personally I always thought of hot nodes as having keys to get compromised but my opinion is, apparently, in the minority)

https://github.com/moocowmoo/dashman/blob/5be9186fef4fb582f29ddaee025e7ca82cb9c9f3/dashvote.py#L202-L236

It'll get some of the info from dash.conf, then poll dashninja for the txn/index

just do 'dashman sync' to pull in the changes.

[cryptonewb]

you can always have multiple 'accounts' I guess, so I really don't get your point.

Then I suggest you take out a Cryptonote hedge (or even go all in ). You can always invest in both. That will save you the headache.

I still think that dash could be it, seems to have a big community and a lot of software (smartphone wallet, GUI, ...)
Also, a bigger market cap. So it has a better chance than cryptonote.

But I need to investigate it a bit more. I'm now syncing my DASH client to test it out. I'll try to do some darksend and instantX tomorrow
I also got some answers on the questions I asked in the monero topic, will also try to test that out in one of the next days, so I can compare.

I still don't really understand how monero works. Thanks to the explanation by Evan, I think most of my concerns are gone, although I need to look at it a bit more:

1) How are the masternode locks enforced in the network? How do you force miners to not mine a double spent transaction?
2) Is it possible that there is a competing locked transaction? If that transaction has a higher fee (double spend attempt), I guess the miners rather confirm the transaction with the higher fee...
3) Masternodes don't get fees to lock transactions? What is the incentive to do the work? How are the masternode rewards distributed? How can the network "know" that masternodes are online and doing the work in stead of just being idle to have a lower bandwidth usage?
4) I wonder how you can have so much transactions per second? (the slide shows 500-1500) I read that bitcoin is limited to 7 transactions per second. I showed that it seems impossible to lock 350 transactions simultaneously with 3500 masternodes, unless you allow overlap. But that should be avoided, because it can happen that a masternode has the power to decide which of the 2 transactions he confirms during a double spend attack.

1.) There is code that scans all incoming blocks for transaction locks when accepting transactions and blocks. This means that a block that contains a conflicting transaction will be automatically rejected.
2.) The answer to this one is 3 fold.
    a. Currently if there are conflicting locks on the network, they will actually cancel each other. 2 conflicting locks doesn't really give miners a choice, it just removes instantX and goes back to proof of work.
    b. The quorums are selected by inputs though, so you'll get the same quorum for the same transaction even with a different fee. This means, they would have already decided and no conflicting lock would be issued.
    c. The new improved way is to use the quorum timestamp, then take the earliest one always.
3.) Masternodes are paid from the blockchain reward, which will be worth more as the services are utilized more. My position is that monetary services of the network should be provided at no or low cost, then we can add on other services over the coming years by financing them from the budget. The masternode network will own Virtual Corporations that are working to expand the reach of Dash. Then they will be paid from the dividends from those companies (a few years off).
4.) DAPI was just one of many components -- it isn't what allows for such scalability  

1) so the transaction locks are part of the consensus rules? That indeed makes sense. Still strange to wrap my head around it, because in bitcoin miners "lock" transactions in blocks
2) a - doesn't really seems safe to accept InstantX transactions  
b - so what happens in case there are 3 different inputs? Transaction 1  has input A and B, transaction 2 has input A and C. A is being double spend.  are the oracles for the first transaction different from the second one, or is there an overlap?
c - timestamps aren't 100% right all the time and can be manipulated.
3) you didn't answer the question on how the network knows that a masternode isn't idling and doing his job. This seems pretty important!
4) so we need to wait... I hope we know more when the amsterdam vid is online



edit: this is the main reason I still believe that the DASH network effect is just bigger and dash probably has more chances to succeed:

It seems like this cryptonote thing and dash have a different approach to privacy. need to research more now...

Yes, Cryptonote has so called on-chain anonymity, and DASH has so called off-chain anonymity. They are different approaches aiming to achieve the same thing. The difference is, that the mixing of inputs and outputs (where the money is coming and where it's going) is retained in the blockchain and protected by math in on-chain anonymity, whereas in DASH's off-chain anonymity the mixing is done outside the blockchain by the masternode network and the link between inputs and outputs is not recorded into the blockchain.

I'm not sure if the coming Evolution version will change that though? Evan has hinted that all transactions will be private by default which would imply that there will be some changes to how the anonymity is achieved.

In the end we're all going after the same thing, a replacement for fiat, that can't corrupted or controlled by any single entity.

Requirements:
- Fungibility - All units of the current must be interchangeable (after sending coins they shouldn't have history attached)
- Speed - The currency must be able to compete with credit cards (1-5 second double-spend proof confirmations)
- Governance - The currency must be governed in a decentralized and decisive way
- Funding - The currency must have a permanent decentralized funding source for development, marketing, legal, etc
- Scalability - The currency must be able to scale to billions of transactions per day with 100% decentralization
- Ease Of Use - The currency must be usable by normal every day people

DASH attempts to fulfill all those requirements above and is actively working towards them, and features currently 4 (and a half as it has a basic GUI wallet I suppose) of them. Cryptonote coins seem to aim only at 1/6th of those requirements of digital cash.

[ArticMine]

I have similar experience with Cryptsy. Though for 0.75 BTC but same. And support disappeared 3 days ago. 7 days waiting...

I just don't have these issues with Cryptsy
I put 1.0 DASH in today and pull out 1.12..DASH a few minutes later
I understands it's less than $5USD
You think that maybe they are manually processing 'larger' amounts?
or worse
Using your coins to make 'money' for themselves?
anything is possible....

Or simply they ran out of XBT and LTC but not of DASH. I smell the ghost of Gox 2.0 here. The trick is to figure out what currencies they still have left, sell for those and get out. The fact that they locked Otoh's account is a real red flag. Mt Gox allowed me to reverse my pending CAD withdrawal, which I managed to convert to XBT and get out at a profit due to the Silk Road seizure in 2013. If they are in trouble they may want to prevent this kind of thing.